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Tim O’Reilly

Founder of O'Reilly Media & Host of Next:Economy Conference

Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media Inc and a pioneering thinker in the future of work space. O’Reilly Media publishes a weekly newsletter, Next:Economy, that explores the transformative role of tech in work, life, and society. In conjunction with this venture, O’Reilly Media also hosts an annual Next:Economy conference that brings together leading thinkers from around the world to discuss the future of work. Over the years, Tim O’Reilly has built a culture where sustainable innovation is a key tenet of business philosophy. His active engagement with technology communities both drives the company’s product development and informs its marketing. O’Reilly Media also hosts conferences on technology topics, including the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, Strata: The Business of Data, the Velocity Conference on Web Performance and Operations, and many others. Tim’s blog, the O’Reilly Radar “watches the alpha geeks” to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. Tim is also a partner at O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, O’Reilly’s early stage venture firm, and is on the board of Safari Books Online, PeerJ, Code for America, and Maker Media, which was recently spun out from O’Reilly Media. Maker Media’s Maker Faire has been compared to the West Coast Computer Faire, which launched the personal computer revolution.

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Fifty years ago the Whole Earth Catalog burst onto the cultural scene and helped set in motion waves of innovation that reverberated through the San Francisco Bay Area and the rest of America – and that continue to this day. The one-and-only Stewart Brand was the creative force behind that unique media publication and cultural phenomenon and we’re honored that he talked about the Whole Earth’s intellectual and entrepreneurial legacy at our What’s Now: San Francisco. He also talked the positive side of having to solve a civilizational-scale problem like climate change and why he believes we will solve it. The event also featured a dozen remarkable people give moving testimonials about the legacy of the catalog and Stewart. Be sure to watch this unforgettable evening.

We were thrilled that our November edition of What’s Now: San Francisco served Tim O’Reilly’s official book launch party, hosted in conjunction with Bloomberg Beta. At What’s Now, the founder of O’Reilly Media laid out his thoughts on the future of work, and in particular, the role that platforms will play in this future.

This kickoff event for our new Future of Work series featured a stellar lineup of thought leaders engaged in reimagining the future of work. During this event, we began the process of catalyzing a network that will generate new ideas and insights that could help independent workers thrive in the years ahead.

In the second of two panels during our Future of Work kickoff event, Gary Bolles asked our four panelists to speak for five minutes each about the most important thing they’ve learned in the last year about independent workers, and the best places to apply new efforts in the coming year to help independent workers…

After hearing from our eight panelists in two separate panels and Q&A sessions, participants broke out into groups to further discuss the questions posed by the panelists, and then reassembled to briefly share insights.

The Bay Area tech community, like much of the rest of the country, is still grappling with what Trump’s election will mean for the future of the United States. The future of many digital efforts—including the United States Digital Service, created by President Obama in 2014 to encourage people with tech expertise to do a tour of duty improving government—is one looming question.

Tim O’Reilly, Founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, believes we should rethink the world using today’s technology. “Let’s stop optimizing for the short-term. Let’s start optimizing for the long-term, and think about how to make the society we want,” O’Reilly says.

Technological advances in the private sector are often not realized in public sectors. Our roundtable anchor, Tim O’Reilly, presented ideas about algorithmic regulation that could be applied to regulation in the public sector to improve the effectiveness and responsiveness of traditionally clunky systems.

Government is responsible for essential functions of society like ensuring running water, working sewage, and roads—yet bureaucracy often gets a bad rap. How can we leverage common tech practices to make government bureaucracies work better?